It’s a truth universally acknowledged that hardcore will never die – but are you sure you know what hardcore is?
A music journalist for 15 years and raver for much longer, Holly Dicker has documented dance music’s heaviest, gnarliest and speediest niches, from deep dives on breakcore to trench reports on Thunderdome and Bang Face. But in her debut book, Dance or Die: A History of Hardcore, she attempts to answer that very big question.
Researched and written over four years, the book is a historical map of hardcore in its many forms, from the pioneering hardware assault developed in Frankfurt and Berlin, to London’s grubbiest squat raves, Dutch intercity gabber rivalries and Scotland’s ‘tartan techno’ explosion – and right through to the modern torchbearers of hard dance. As ever with music history, nothing is as linear as it seems, and one of the book’s successes is connecting these overlapping movements through vivid snapshots of grassroots hardcore energy.
In this episode, Holly dials in from – where else? – Rotterdam to talk us through the crucial rave tales collected in Dance or Die, as well as revealing her personal history with hardcore and offering her thoughts on where the scene went wrong post-Covid. Buy the book right away from Velocity Press and check out Holly’s Instagram for updates on Dance or Die events and talks coming up in Paris and Amsterdam.
As per usual, a quick reminder that if you’re enjoying No Tags, a great way to help out the pod is by giving us a (good!) rating on your podcast app of choice, leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts, or liking this post on Substack. And if you really love the pod, you can subscribe to our paid tier for £5 per month and become a member of No Tags’ own hardcore crew. Thanks to this month’s new subscribers!
CR: Hardcore obviously means a lot of different things to different people. So what are you talking about when you talk about hardcore?
Holly Dicker: I had an assumption of what hardcore might have meant, and then I started researching this thing and every time I was interviewing someone they would come up with some other different but completely compelling answer. So I just thought, shit – I better get to the bottom of this before I begin. Which is partly why this whole thing took about four years – it was about three years of figuring out what the hell hardcore meant. In the end I had to take it out of the music context, because musically hardcore means a whole stratum of different types of music, which I tried to piece together in the appendix. I did so much research about it. But yeah, hardcore for me is the people and it's the community. At the end of the day, music is just so personal, isn't it? But the way we respond to music is more of a universal feeling. So that's the starting point, or the end point, I guess.
TL: Did the book start as something slightly more specific?
H: I've been researching this thing without really knowing it pretty much since I started becoming a music journalist, working for Resident Advisor, since 2011. I think some of my first pieces were actually writing about breakcore, of all things. I remember being introduced to the team at the time and [former RA editor] Todd Burns was like, ‘This is Holly. She comes from Hastings but she doesn't know who Sasha or Digweed is. She'd rather write about breakcore.’ So I've done a lot of pieces covering the weird, noisy, strange [genres] which I thought needed to have more of a platform.
Bang Face was a really important one, when I covered that in 2015. I was going on a nice trajectory. I was getting really deep into hardcore, especially around 2017, and I went to Thunderdome [pictured above] and started really understanding what the Dutch version of it meant. Then Covid happened, and suddenly none of us had a livelihood or a future or anything anymore. At this moment I managed to get a connection to Velocity Press and I just sent an email saying, ‘I've been thinking about hardcore, maybe it's a book.’ And I got a call the next day [from] Colin [Steven, Velocity boss], who was like, ‘Sounds great, here's the contract.’ And I was like, shit, I’d better come up with a book idea now, but also money to do it. I ended up writing a pitch to get a government grant from Rotterdam. This whole book has sort of been funded by the Rotterdam council, which is pretty insane. And not only once but twice, so thank you Rotterdam!
The pitch that I sent was very much based on the stuff that I had been writing about, very much Dutch based. But the more interviews I did, the broader [it became]. I was talking to people like Lenny Dee, I was looking at scenes in America but also the London free party scene, the full spectrum. And the more I talked to people, I realised that I knew absolutely nothing about hardcore, and I had better think about it a bit more and keep talking [laughs]. The whole book ended up getting scrapped and rewritten, pretty much, at the start of this year.
CR: Many dance music histories, including yours, identify ‘We Have Arrived’ by Mescalinium United as the beginning of hardcore. Even more specifically, in the book you talk about it being played one night in 1992 at a Mayday party in Cologne. What's the significance of this one track to the story of hardcore?
HD: It starts a little bit earlier, I think, in ‘89, the year where basically [this] dance music begins. There's a 20-year-old kid from Frankfurt who's more into hip-hop [Marc Acardipane]. He gets a whole bunch of machines and he figures out that actually, ‘I don't need my punk band or anybody else to make music. I'm gonna go with this.’ Meanwhile, he has this period of insane episodic nightmares where he goes to sleep, has this dream about the end of the world, wakes up, has his day, probably makes some music, then goes to sleep and goes back into the dream.
This goes on for a couple of weeks and then he decides, ‘This is too compelling. I need to write a track about it.’ This is the sound of ‘We Have Arrived’, which, honestly, I've heard it so many times and even today it gives me goosebumps. In headphones or in any rave, in a massive stadium, in a tiny basement with three people, it absolutely kicks off. This is the sound of the end of the world, from 1990, which still resonates today.
But the thing is, a kid who's 20, in Frankfurt, who doesn't know anything, is not gonna get any respect from all of the DJ elite. So this is Marc Acardipane and he's met Thorsten Lambart. They both applied for the same job at this nightclub, Marc got it, Thorsten ended up working in a warehouse and learning all the tricks of the trade. They think, fuck it, we are just gonna do it ourselves. So they press up this vinyl and they try and get DJs to play it. Nobody gives a shit. Two years later no one really cares about it. But this guy from Brooklyn, Lenny Dee, discovers it and he gets it immediately and he's like, ‘I need to sign this thing.’ They actually meet by chance – well, they're booked for the same party and Lenny has a bit too much fun and needs to be rescued. Marc takes him back to his studio, plays him all this music, and [Lenny’s] like, ‘I'm about to start my record label. I have a couple of records cued up, ready to go – but fuck all of that, we are gonna launch with this one, ‘cause this is the future.’ Marc's like, ‘Sure, sounds great. Let's go.’
Lenny fast-forwards it to the pressing plant just in time to play at the biggest rave in the world in 1992, which is Mayday Cologne. And the way Lenny describes it, I'm just there, I'm in this stadium, I'm hearing the sound of the feet on the floor, the silence, the crackling plastic as they wait for the first bit of this opening track, and then just the whole place going ballistic. And at that point, I think everyone's like, ‘This is what hardcore is.’ That is the beginning. That's 1992. At the same time, around the world, hardcore is kicking off absolutely everywhere, because dance music in 1992 was fucking hardcore.
CR: You say that Marc Acardipane was into hip-hop, but what's feeding into this expression of hardcore at this point? It's not New York house music. It's not Detroit techno, necessarily, is it? What other things are feeding into it?
HD: Frankfurt at the time had this EBM legacy, so you had Talla 2XLC who claimed the word techno at that point, but what he meant was music made with technology, and at that time he really meant EBM. At the same time you also had this Frankfurt techno sound, which was a bit more cheesy, synth pop, Sven Väth, ‘Electrica Salsa’ kind of style. None of those things particularly appealed to Marc, the hip-hop head. He was more [into] The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land, but also Detroit electro and crossing the border to Belgium, the rave sound. So [he’s] bringing all of these elements together and then doing his own take on it, really. EBM meets Chicago house. One was not funky enough, the other was too straight, so he thought he'd mix it up and call it techno.
CR: I’m interested in how much regional tribalism there was in those early scenes. What is typical of Frankfurt at this point compared to another German city or somewhere in Belgium?
HD: This book is very much about secret rivalries between cities. It turns out that in every single country there were two cities locked in this battle for whoever claimed this thing that became big. We all know the UK story, you know, the North versus London. In Holland it was Amsterdam versus Rotterdam. In Germany it was Berlin versus Frankfurt. Techno was something that both cities staked their claim on from the start.
Frankfurt had the industry set up. They had all of the best nightclubs in the world. They had all the DJs, they had the hierarchies, the celebrity culture. They had the ‘I'm from Frankfurt, who the fuck are you? We invented this shit’ attitude. Marc definitely has an element of that, but then he also has this humble, weird, counterintuitive thing – there's this internal battle which really makes him and his music so fascinating. He is from Frankfurt, but he's not from that kind of Frankfurt elite which was really embattled against Berlin.
Look at Berlin on the other side, this was a city [that was] physically and psychologically divided, ravaged by war, poor, and yet full of opportunities for those who dared to try. That's what Tresor really seized upon – that mentality, that community ethos, that DIY spirit. We can do anything, we just have to do it together. No heroes. No lights! The raver, the person on the dancefloor, is as important as the person mopping the toilets, as the person who is playing the music.
Tanith from Tresor really embodies that, so that's why I picked up on those two characters. Tanith is actually from somewhere just outside of Frankfurt, but he recognised all of those elements of Frankfurt that didn't sit right with him, and as soon as he got to Berlin he was like, ‘Okay, I've got it. This is me.’ That's how he became the kind of Marc Acardipane equivalent, the godfather of hardcore in Berlin. These two cities had very different attitudes, and when it came to the Maydays, that's when it all collided. It really kicks off literally at a Mayday rave, literally in a fight.
CR: Did you feel like you were untangling any received wisdom that you had about this story along the way?
HD: I feel like I untangled my own wisdom along the way. The thing is, the more you know about or learn about something, the more you realise you actually don't know anything. That is what I got caught up in at some point. You just have to realise we are never gonna actually know. And once we do, what's the point in doing this anymore? We always have to be on this journey of discovery. I hate getting things wrong and I apologise if I've made a whole ton of mistakes, but I really try to follow threads and get it as true as it can possibly be. But what I really learned is that we can never fully know. It is mostly the people who shout the loudest, and that’s the history that we get. So I've tried to find those quieter voices, the lesser-known records that have made just as big a statement with a different group of people. That's been the hidden agenda with this.
I've got a whole discography at the back. The whole book could have been a discography. It's just endless. If I've learned anything about hardcore, it’s that it really can mean everything if you allow it to, if you have a good enough argument. But with this particular record, I also noticed [that] music is really in dialogue with music itself. There's lots of back and forth. Everyone assumes this is the thing. Actually, hardcore made a point of responding to it and going, ‘Nah, this is the thing.’ Cue the series of diss records and everyone remixing each other and having a fight about it. [Laughter]
TL: In that spirit, it might be good to take a moment for Lenny Dee, who maybe appears more than anyone else in the book?
HD: Does he?!
TL: Maybe I'm slightly off there but he pops up a lot. He just feels like a very crucial figure. We've mentioned him signing ‘We Have Arrived,’ but it would be useful to talk about his role in hardcore.
Holly: First off, Lenny is quite a character, to say the least. The first time I interviewed him it was for RA, for this 2017 Thunderdome feature. I think our good pal Hue Taylor [of the excellent Skill Issue newsletter] was the one who had to transcribe it. It turned out to be, like, 20 pages long – so respect to you Hue. In the end I only used a couple of quotes.
I'm glad you feel like Lenny is quite an important figure, because he is. Every person that I interviewed mentioned him as someone who really triggered them or inspired them or kept them going, or gave them a sense of family and a connection. He was there before hardcore and had been through so many different musical cycles before coming to hardcore. So it was important to give him enough space, but also for it not to be the Lenny Dee show, ‘cause he's not like that at all. Even with his label, his whole point is he rarely writes his own music, he always collaborates with people. He's very much this trigger, this catalyst for other people. So I hope I've reflected that in the way I've written about him.
He was basically in the UK at the right time after building a thing from scratch in his hometown, with Frankie Bones, as a teenager. Those two were also neighbourhood rivals – so from the very beginning, war and rivalry has been part of [hardcore] DNA. It makes sense, doesn't it? Hardcore has got that aggressive element. I think Lenny’s first gig was actually at Heaven, which is another nightclub in London which I don't think gets enough credit for what it's done for dance music.
Lenny and Frankie were working closely together, but then they ended up going on quite separate paths. Lenny stayed in the club arena and did the first electronic dance music tour with Carl Cox, which I don't think a lot of people know about. I was really fascinated when I found that out. Those two have been quite close friends for a long time.
TL: What year was tour that in?
HD: It must be 1990. And Frankie Bones, with some other collaborators, went down the illegal rave route. He did the Energy raves. When they were back in New York, Lenny was more into, ‘I'm gonna make a label and DJ and do that thing.’ Whereas Frankie Bones, he started Storm Rave and brought rave to New York. But they both were at [NY club] the Limelight, which is another very important club with quite a sad and shady history. If you wanna get the full scope on that you should really read Frank Owen's book which is absolutely spectacular. It's about the Limelight and the downfall of it all.
TL: We should talk about how the hardcore sound impacted Berlin in those years after the Wall came down. Tresor feels like it becomes the breeding ground for it, or the centrepiece. What was the club like at the time?
HD: I’m privileged that I worked quite closely with Tresor when I was living in Berlin, so this Tresor element is written from personal experience, from the heart. But if you want to know what the original sound of Tresor was, and the feeling and the vibe of it, it's the sound and feeling of Tresor right now. That's the beautiful thing about Tresor, it has really maintained its essence and its core. I genuinely feel like you could walk through that alleyway full of smoke, that smell, that mouldy… you feel the bass before you hear anything, and then suddenly you’re just blinded and there's bodies. You can get that experience right now if you go to Tresor, and that's exactly what it was like back then. So on that alone, that's why I think Tresor has done a really rare thing – to be able to endure, pure, untouched, after basically the entire world and music industry has changed beyond recognition.
I say that it's the first hardcore techno club because being on that dancefloor, enduring all of that, for me that is also what hardcore is. To this day you can stand in that nightclub and they will not turn it off until the last person leaves. That's bloody hardcore as well. And the staff, they love it. This isn't a job, this is a life. You can read my book and then go and experience it. I don't think I need to say anything more about it! Just go to Tresor.
TL: Have you ever been that last person standing?
HD: Oh, of course. All the time. That's my thing. I am the first one in and the last one to leave to this day.
TL: Hardcore will never die and Holly will never leave.
HD: Holly might die whilst listening to hardcore. [Laughs]
CR: I think a lot of people understand that the interactions between techno and the opening up of East Berlin are really central to techno history, in Berlin and beyond. But I was wondering what you make of the political affiliations of that hardcore scene at the time? There are points in your history where it does seem very politicised, and then there are other points where it perhaps seems more nihilistic, or more like an escape. How political was that particular strain of techno in Berlin at the time?
HD: Dance music is extremely political and extremely apolitical. It really is both and it really depends on who you're talking to. When it comes to hardcore, there's no in-between, no grayscale… There's been a lot of interviews where people have expressly said dance music should have nothing to do with politics, and then a lot of interviews where they say dance music is pure politics. It's really hard to put both of these in the same narrative, so what I've tried to do is let both of them sit side by side.
In Berlin you had this real clash with the gabbers, the second generation. After Tresor, [they] moved into the Bunker for a couple of years, and this is where the people who thought ‘Yeah, Tresor was hard, but we can do it harder’ developed this even more intense version. I’m talking about Xol Dog 400 and the Gabba Nation collective, who held court in this absolutely insane building. You can see it now, towering over Mitte, pockmarked with bullets. It's seen war, and inside it recreated the sound of war with this shattering sound system every Friday night, pushing the techno sound to the extremes.
It wasn't about politics mostly, but then it all becomes political when the police are shutting you down. The city is changing. The whole gentrification issue had started already back in the ‘90s. The legacy continues, but it has been going on since ‘96, and this is sort of what the Fuckparade became about – but again, it's also not political.
CR: Fuckparade, for anyone who's not up to speed, is the opposite to the Berlin Love Parade. It's an attitude that's connected to them feeling outcast, right? You don't need to have that attitude until someone tells you that you're doing something wrong, and then the attitude becomes ‘fuck you.’ Which is both political and just a reaction, I suppose.
HD: Yeah, for sure. Politics and dance music has become a lot more pronounced in the last five years, I think with this Covid experience and politics today. It's really become so caught up in rave culture, it's almost like you can't [separate] the two. [No Tags has] actually done quite a lot of shows about this. But I feel like back then politics could be a little bit more personal and less… how can I say this? You could have a discussion about it and it not be on the internet and then you’re suddenly…. I just feel like as soon as the internet arrived, social media plus politics, it's just become a real time bomb – plus rave culture, and now they've all become enmeshed. But before all of that, politics was either something you talked about or you demonstrated, and you felt it, you lived it, you discussed it. But now it's sort of become something else.
TL: You write about Spiral Tribe as the UK torchbearers of hardcore. I'm sure people listening will know a little bit about Spiral Tribe, especially if you listen to our free party episode with Grace Sands. They were one of the big UK free party sound system crews of the early ‘90s alongside people like DiY Soundsystem. They had this nomadic life on the road and eventually left the UK in the mid-90s to travel around Europe. What made Spiral Tribe hardcore? Was it just the music they played or was it the lifestyle, the politics?
HD: I focused on Spiral Tribe because I had the wonderful, crazy opportunity to work with them, or namely the two main producers, the R-ZAC duo of 69db and Simon Crystal Distortion. They ended up calling us at [Rotterdam label and promoter] PRSPCT one day saying, ‘We've got all our rights back, we've heard about PRSPCT, can you help us release [our music]?’
This was during Covid. I think we invited them over one day, it was during lockdown and we were doing seated raves. The concept obviously doesn't work, but it was brilliant. We did a seated rave with Spiral Tribe. You can only imagine how that ended. It ended in a bloody office rave until the next day. I remember going downstairs for a smoke and coming back up and all the windows were boarded up, tables pushed [out the way], people with no shoes on. Two people broke their feet that night. We all had a great time. It was all cleaned up afterwards.
So we had a proper reenactment of the Spiral Tribe office party that they did when they first signed their contract with [UK dance record label] Big Life. They decided back then that they were gonna kind of test the mettle with Big Life. They got an advance and they were like, well, they can hire us a rig and we're gonna do a free party. It obviously got shut down by the police, but then they moved the party inside the office space to celebrate signing the contract. And almost 30 years to the day they did the same thing with us at PRSPCT, so there's something in that.
Anyway, I managed to chat to both of those two and I thought, ‘Gosh, I don't think this story has actually been told, about the music side of things.’ Another plug for Velocity Press, but Spiral Tribe’s Mark Harrison has written his memoir and the focus is very much on the personal story of the collective and how they got started. I felt like we were missing more of the musical element. As a music journalist, as a nerd, I thought that was really important to focus on, but also to highlight the difference between the music that Spiral Tribe were making and the music that was essentially pop music at the time in the UK, which was “hardcore” rave. Sorry everyone, but this is actually the original hardcore. I wanted to make a distinction between hardcore rave and hardcore-hardcore, which was the Spiral Tribe sound.
The chief thing was just their attitude and their approach and the fact that they absolutely sacrificed everything to keep this thing going. That is why they are the hardcore of the hardcore – of the British hardcore, let's say. And yes, they made a lot of mistakes. They had visions, they tried and they failed. They took on the police and the government and sometimes they won, sometimes they lost. But you know what? They just kept going and they're still going now. That's why it was really important to use them. There's plenty of others, but I try, in each of these stories, to just focus on one key person or label, to make it easier to follow what hardcore can and cannot mean.
CR: At the same time, and in fact overlapping with Spiral Tribe, there were squat parties. A lot of people who are living a life out on the road in the summer might squat in the winter as well, so it's some of the same people. The squat party scene that you write about seems even more musically hardcore. The crossover is more with punk and metal, Napalm Death, almost noise. There is this sense usually that dance music is euphoric. But once we've got into this scene, the idea of euphoria seems to have disappeared. Is hardcore anti-euphoria in some way?
HD: Look, I feel euphoric when I am listening to the most noisy, ear-bleeding [music]. That makes me happy. A lot of people say happy music makes me sad, sad music makes me happy. Euphoria is a rushing sense of release. You can get it from thrashy speedcore as much as you can from happy piano riffs. It really depends on your personal preference. Personally, I like the noise. I like the speedcore and the guitars. The louder, weirder, noisier the better. But that's not to say that's better or worse than any other types of hardcore.
CR: No. And anyone who loves metal, they're not gonna say, ‘I listen to it in order to feel bad.’ People just enjoy dark music, right? I guess what I was trying to get at was that it seems like a better vehicle for anger, and protest even. It's allowing a different kind of energy, or even encouraging a different type of emotion than I think you might be able to have at Creamfields or the equivalent.
HD: Never been to Creamfields, couldn’t say. [Laughter] Thank god!
TL: I'm not sure any of us have been to Creamfields.
CR: But if intensity and euphoria and pleasure can come from all different types of music, then by the time you're describing this squat party scene, there's something else going on isn't there? There's an emotion there that you're not getting from trance, or whatever else is popping up at the time.
HD: We should specifically mention what we're talking about. We are talking about the Praxis and the Dead By Dawn parties, which are in a really important countercultural space on Railton Road in Brixton. I keep talking about space because space is so important. If we don't have space for this culture, to manifest and for us to get together and experience it, then we don't have this thing. Space can also mean an open field, but a lot of the time it's a brick building or a basement, so a lot of the chapters focus on a key space.
This one we're talking about is the 121 Centre, which was a legendary space from the early ‘80s until, again, it was gentrified and forced to close. For this interview I spoke to a collaborator of Christoph [Fringeli], the founder of Praxis. I spoke to Simon Crab, who’s from a really important British industrial band [Bourbonese Qualk] and who ended up helping Christoph start squatting and also start Praxis. Then they started making music together.
Simon describes the music as not like rave at all. It was intimidating, very noisy and confrontational – it was anti-rave, but it was still raving. When he told me that, I was just like, ‘Wow, that's hardcore, isn't it?’ It was just really aggressive and dangerous – physically, literally dangerous, in a rickety old basement with soil on the floor. So much smoke, so loud. I feel like this is the same vibe that you'd have in Tresor as well, and at a Spiral Tribe rave. You are safe but you are not. You are on the edge of normality and you're gonna push things right to the limit. This was the thread that connected all of these similar but different scenes.
I think the same thing was happening at a PCP rave. That was dangerous. That was nuts. They would go around with an air gun, MCs with their faces wrapped in bandages, just terror. It was terrifying. Then you get to Rotterdam and you see a Hellraiser and you see a guy dressed up as Pinhead literally sawing off a raver's leg and it's splurting blood, and then topless dancers come on and writhe around in the blood on the floor and you're like, ‘Wow… what the hell's going on?’ [Laughter] I'm not sure if this is answering your question about euphoria…
TL: That feels very metal-adjacent, honestly.
HD: Theatrics, for sure. Especially when you get to these gabber parties, it's very theatrical, and talking about euphoria, all the ravers are on at least three ecstasies, you can see in all the videos they're absolutely twisted. One of the chapters of the book is on ‘tartan techno’ and [Scottish rave] Rezerection, and they were doing the same kind of theatrics but with happier sounding music. The euphoric thread, the response is the same, it's just the music is different.
TL: A lot of music subcultures are about things that aren't just music – they're also about fashion and culture and whatever. Gabber has a very ingrained relationship to football and it's a subculture that is incredibly territorial too. So who were the early gabbers, and why was Rotterdam a natural breeding ground for them?
HD: This chapter took a particularly long time to put together, because where do you start with this? We've been talking about fights and rivalry – well, this particular rivalry in the Netherlands was really not a joke. It was to do with the football culture, which naturally blended in with the gabber culture. The artists picked it up and played with it and turned it into a bit more of a thing, and lots of violence ensued and it got really quite nasty for a while.
But to answer your question, why Rotterdam? These two scenes started at the same time and you can't have one without the other – the other one being Amsterdam. Rotterdam people will say it started here. Amsterdam will say it started in Amsterdam. And the truth is, it's a bit of both. Plus the Hague, plus some other things, plus Lenny Dee, et cetera. But when you're writing a linear book, it's very hard – you've gotta start somewhere, which is why I chose to start with the gabber culture, because for me this is the most important thing about gabber, the subculture. If you really want a definition, gabber is actually the subculture. The music itself is very specific. It was this brief moment of the rave before the early ‘90s, and then it becomes hardcore.
TL: Gabber was originally used to describe a type of person and then the music stemmed from that, right?
HD: Yes. It started off as a diss word from Amsterdam, actually. I spent quite a lot of time doing the etymology, because just like hardcore, I really wanted to know where it came from. I thought I knew and I thought other people knew, but actually it's another word that's misused quite a lot. So it started off as a diss word from Amsterdam, and then gabbers sort of embraced it and said, ‘Yeah, I'm a gabber. This is me.’ This is Ilya from [Amsterdam rave] Multigroove, who was banned from the door of the Roxy because he had his trainers on, and he didn't look smart enough and he had long hair and he wanted to take ecstasy and just have a bit of a dance. He's like, ‘I'm gonna start my own thing.’
But in Rotterdam a different culture formed. The tracksuit look, which is so iconic now, was definitely formed first in Rotterdam. Speedy J for a long time was wearing tracksuits. This casual look is very much ingrained in Rotterdam, not being pressured to look fancy. It's just being yourself, which for me is the Rotterdam gabber spirit.
CR: It makes sense that it’s not the capital city. It’s not a place that is as fancy. It's got its own separate identity. And I guess it's distinctly working class.
HD: What's the famous line? ‘Amsterdam dreams whilst Rotterdam works.’ So Rotterdam, yes, it's a harbour city, and that plays a big part in terms of the multicultural aspect and the work hard, play hard aspect. But I think it's too easy to get caught up on these assumed narratives. I wanted to actually unpack that, because Amsterdam plays just as fucking hard as Rotterdam, and actually Amsterdam had all the illegal raves really early on. So it's sort of unpicking it and going, was it like that?
TL: In a book that outlines hardcore in many forms, is gabber the most hardcore?
HD: No. [Laughs] Straight away, didn't even have to think about it, absolutely not. Breakcore is the hardcore of the hardcore, as I have now managed to say publicly in the Groove magazine article which has just come out. But no, gabber for me is like pop music. Gabber is like UK hardcore rave – poppy, a bit silly, very community driven. And that's the best thing about it. But the hardcore of the hardcore is, for me personally, breakcore. It's this thing that is so niche, only the weirdos are into this thing. It will never be cool. You can't describe it. It refuses to be pinned down. And once you're in it, you're in it forever. Once you make breakcore you can't do anything else. Whereas I think if you make gabber you're gonna move around a bit.
CR: Career advice there. [Laughter] You write a little bit about Scotland and I have to say I knew very little about any of this. So could you tell us, what was ‘tartan techno’ and why did it appear and then burn out so quickly?
HD: I've been to Scotland maybe once, so the scene is very unknown to me. What I was chasing in this scenario was the crossover between Scotland and Rotterdam. I was like, how the hell did that happen? And all roads lead to Scott Brown – the king of tartan techno, the Marc Acardipane of Scotland, absolute genius, a hundred million aliases. Got screwed over by the industry so did it himself. He’s really down to earth and insane. I don’t know quite how or why, but he crossed over into the Netherlands, I think he played the Hague first, or Utrecht, and then very quickly connected with [Dutch DJ] Paul Elstak. Then Paul Elstak was at Rezerection and it was all actually via Bass Generator, who I haven't mentioned enough, but he had the shop that bought all the records and he was helping programme Rezerection. And for whatever reason, Rotterdam gabber was just absolutely massive in Scotland.
Around ‘94, there's this one Rezerection where it really lands and everyone just goes nuts. Just as the whistles and the gloves and the rave thing dies down in the South, it becomes really big in Scotland and merges with gabber, and this is what tartan techno is. You close your eyes and it sounds like you're in Rotterdam and at a gabber rave, you open them and you're surrounded by inflatable penises and white gloves and you can smell Vicks in the air and you're wondering what the fuck is going on. And I was watching all of these old school videos, 'cause they've been really well documented, and I just thought, ‘It looks familiar. It looks like Bang Face’.
TL: Surely Scott Brown must have played Bang Face.
HD: He did last year and I wasn't there. Absolutely gutted. I have to say, absolute props to James [St. Acid, Bang Face boss]. I don't think any other festival programmes like this, but he will do a post on the Bang Face social media community pages and go, ‘Right, this is the thread, drop who you want to see play at this weekender.’ And then he will programme his festival around popular demand. He said that Scott Brown was the most requested and so he booked him.
TL: I have done a little bit of research in the field here, because I went to university in Aberdeen, which is in the north of Scotland. Coming from London it was eye-opening the extent to which that music was still in the water. I was actually in a trendy house and techno crowd at uni – we would go see Theo Parrish and Andrew Weatherall or whoever DJ, but if you went to any afters long enough, someone would put on a Scott Brown mix. It was undeniable. And it was always a running joke that the further north you got in Scotland, the faster the BPM would be of the music coming out of cars. I actually dated someone whose family lived in Thurso, which is right at the north of the UK, and every other car is just blaring hardcore CDs.
HD: It died in the raves, but it lives on just like gabber. Hardcore, as they all say, will never die. This is the point. It might look like it's gone, but it’s still blasting in cars, it’s shredded out of windows, it’s tattooed onto skin, and tartan techno is the hardcore of Scotland. When I did my Manchester launch, there were these two very beautiful looking people there, I couldn't imagine them ever going to a rave. I was like, ‘Gosh, what are you doing here?’ They're both from Scotland and they're like, ‘We are just massive Scott Brown fans, you mentioned hardcore and we just had to turn up.’ I was like, there you go. So Scott, if you're listening, keep it up!
TL: It's like Essex boys and DJ EZ, he just gets passed down from generation to generation.
CR: I wrote about Bang Face in 2020, the doomed final festival before lockdown. I was writing very specifically about the rehabilitation of happy hardcore and how Bang Face was a big part of that. It’s weird looking at it five years on – why was anyone remotely surprised to hear happy hardcore or other fast, silly music in a dance set? But it has become much more common, and often enough in queer club settings as well. Clearly some kind of recuperation of hardcore, critically, has happened. Did that have any part to play in why you wanted to write the book?
HD: I guess it all goes back to the beginning and why I started. I got pretty obsessed with hardcore from 2017 – interestingly, the year that Marc Acardipane kept banging on about from 1990 onwards, and also the year he came back.
CR: Yeah, it's like an important year in the future that he mythologises in his own work.
HD: Yes and no. I’m not gonna demystify it, but yes, there's a reason, but I'm not sure what, he doesn't say. Smart. But in 2017 things were happening. Whether it is a marketing ploy or real or whatever, hardcore seemed to really come back. Maybe ‘cause I was noticing it and then writing about it, but very significant things happened in 2017. This is the Thunderdome comeback, this is Marc Acardipane’s comeback, and this is also the time that we get Casual Gabberz, who were so significant. They really shaped the post-pandemic hard resurgence that we are experiencing now. You also have Gabber Eleganza, who really was the first person to examine the gabber subculture and try to de-stigmatise it by pursuing it through art and putting it in a different context, in a white cube setting.
All of this was happening around the same time. It wasn't just happy hardcore, there was something happening, and I made it my mission to keep writing about it. Other people joined. Then you had the Hard Dance series from Boiler Room and we were on this nice trajectory of hardcore bubbling up and cross-pollinating and moving into techno and lots of great things happening – and then bam, pandemic, shutdown. And what came out the other end is something that's so far removed from those wonderful community-driven things that I was listening to and enjoying and was hoping would continue.
CR: You've mentioned Covid frequently in this conversation. Personally, I go to clubs again now and I'm enjoying it. But the way that you describe it, it's as if something has really changed or gone missing. Is that for you personally, or in Rotterdam?
HD: Rotterdam has gone from bad to worse, to absolutely nothing. The documentary I made tracks the 30-year history of rave culture here in Rotterdam. I made it with my film partner Dennis van Rijswijk. We did it completely on our own without ever having made a documentary before, whilst I was having a breakdown from writing this book and whilst he was having some personal issues as well. So actually, creating this project together and raving together really saved us, and helped me get this book back on track.
But yeah, the dancefloors have been diminishing here to the point where we almost have nothing left. We've got a Gemeente Nachtplan [municipal night plan] because it's got so bad that there's been a report to highlight what happened. Rotterdam used to be the European leader for night culture. People would travel all over the world to come here, and not just for gabber. Honestly, it was insane, even throughout the 2000s. Then something went extremely wrong.
CR: Is that because of venues closing or is it that the younger generation aren't coming through?
HD: It's venues closing, and rave culture is not taken as seriously as it can and should be, like it is in Amsterdam for example. It's not considered a tourist [attraction], which is nuts. We also have loads of students here, so it seems odd that there is not a vibrant scene. There's things happening, but there's just not the structure or the support. We don't even have a night bus. We've only just got one back now [after Covid] because of the tireless lobbying of Thys Boer [Rotterdam’s Night Mayor] and the independent night council.
You don't really have this weekly ritual of going clubbing so much anymore. Also because it's just so damn expensive. So unfortunately you’ve got one big F-off rave, which costs a bomb and you go nuts for that month, and that's it. Compared to the ‘90s or the 2000s where you had some amazing clubs and you were going out every week. I remember I moved here originally as a student during my Erasmus [study abroad year] in 2004 or 2005, it was absolutely nuts. I was going out every week. Now you've got three clubs. But a new one has just been announced, which is great – I wish them all the best.
TL: You mentioned that hardcore was bubbling before Covid and felt vibrant again, but for you, hasn’t fulfilled its potential post-pandemic. Is that an issue with the way people are making hardcore now? With the DJs?
HD: I think I'm specifically talking about this lovely ‘phenomenon’ that seemed to erupt out of the Covid lockdown scene in the Netherlands, which is this hard techno movement. It caught quite a lot of us by surprise, how suddenly massive it was. Obviously the people who were in the culture have been watching this thing grow for years. When I went and experienced it for myself, at the most extreme commercial end of it, I was actually quite shocked how much it had moved away from the elements of it which were building in the smaller clubs, and the community-driven aspect of it. Through Covid, social media became such a pivotal element of what we now call rave culture, you cannot do a rave without it. And that has fundamentally changed so many aspects of this thing. Hardcore has just got really enmeshed in it. It seems so far removed from these weird niche hardcore things that I had been writing about and studying from the ‘90s and the 2000s, and Bang Face.
CR: Presumably you mean not only that people are filming on their phones, but that there's a visual spectacle on top of that?
HD: If I have to be told ‘Put your phone down’, and if I have to stand and watch someone fall from the sky on a ribbon whilst there are lasers and a cheesy monologue in between every ‘DJ set’, which is actually just a guy pressing some buttons on a prerecord, and actually there are more cameras filming for YouTube and Instagram than actual ravers – then I'm sorry, this isn't a rave. This isn't hardcore. I'm not sure what the hell this is. So that made me sad!
CR: What makes Bang Face hardcore?
HD: God damn. What doesn't make Bang Face hardcore?!
CR: Look how excited you are even thinking about it.
HD: Honestly, look at my face!
CR: Do you want to tell us about your first Bang Face?
HD: I'd love to if I had a few more memories. [Laughter]
CR: That’s the element that we haven't discussed, isn't it?
HD: My mum might be listening! I was lucky enough to go to the very first Bang Face, in 2008 at Camber Sands. Honestly, this is the thing that turned me from a raver into a hardcore raver. It was particularly significant for me 'cause Camber Sands is about a 20-minute drive from where I grew up. I was studying in Manchester at the time. I was raving to the original Warehouse Project when it was exactly that – in a warehouse, and a project, meaning it was only gonna do a couple, now look at it.
But I bought a ticket, we got a chalet, and then I told all my friends from Hastings and they managed to basically make fake wristbands and walk in. So our four-person chalet turned into 10 people sleeping on the floor. I can remember the smell of the second room, you know, feet mixed with vomit. I remember the pool party and just going, ‘This is really, really not a good idea.’ But I hear that now that we're in the very posh Butlins that the pool is absolutely epic and totally safe. I'm definitely going to the pool rave this year.
CR: What is specific about Bang Face that is giving you this excited feeling?
HD: I hate to use this word, but I think it's the only word that in this case actually makes sense – it's an immersive experience. You are fully in, there is no escape. You walk in and just look around and you'll see something completely bananas happening in the corner of your eye. It could be a costume, it could be… I don't know. Just something interesting and wild and spectacular is gonna happen.
CR: A sign, maybe.
HD: Yes, the signage. It's the only place where you can bring your own banners. How did James describe it? It's like turning everyone into an MC without the microphone.
CR: Our friend Hue – who I have to say has given me quite a few good ideas that I've recycled into my own content over the years, so shout out Hue – described it to me as more like a convention than a festival. It's the convention for people who are fans of this subculture. It's a place that takes seriously something that almost no other place or like venue can take seriously, and it gives pride of place to some of the stupidest music I have ever heard.
HD: I think I described it as a silliness done with the utmost seriousness. Think of the most ridiculous thing you could possibly ever imagine, give it a bunch of glow sticks, put it in a costume, then put it on the main stage with absolute next-level production value. Think of a stadium rave but in a crappy holiday park, although now we’ve got a bit of an upgrade. It’s the extremes of it all. Plus the humour. Fancy dress – silly, right? Oh no, this is fancy dress elevated to an art form. You have never seen costumes like it.
TL: What's the best costume you've ever seen there?
HD: It was the bag of drugs walking around…
TL: Wow, just a big baggy?
CR: Imagine getting searched on the way in when you're wearing that.
HD: It was the TV characters theme and it was the Grange Hill character who was a drug addict. Just a massive backstory, but you instantly got that this guy was a bag of drugs. There was also the Thomas the Tank Engine one.
CR: Yeah, like a six-person Thomas the Tank Engine. Do you know what the most terrifying thing I've ever seen at Bang Face was?
HD: Your own face? [Laughter]
CR: I don't quite remember what happened or who led me there, but I found myself in the room where two puffed-out people were re-inflating all the inflatables that have gone down, and there's a sea of sad deflated dolphins and smiley faces and Minions and all of these things. It was really weird to go behind the curtain at that exact moment and find two people [pumping] inflatables.
HD: Shout out to the Toy Crew because, as I mentioned before with Tresor, where the person mopping the toilet is as important as the DJs, Bang Face continues this thing. Without the Toy Crew, these people behind the stage blowing up these sad-ass deflated inflatables, without them it's not Bang Face, and they are as important a part of it as the ravers, as the people on stage. With that in mind, Bang Face is special and unique because it really is this pure essence of hardcore rave, whatever this thing is that began in 1990 and is still ongoing today, but now with this crazy neo-rave explosion soundtrack.
TL: Big question. If you could go back in time and go to any one of the parties detailed in your book, what would you pick?
HD: Oh my god. OK, I'm going with the gut. I have to mention Knowledge Club because it was, in terms of techno, a really absolutely landmark venue. Small, community-driven, Wednesday night, all the hardcore people played there. Most international techno superstars played their first sets there. This was ‘92 ‘til about ‘94, and it really was the thing that brought techno to London clubs. It went harder-edged pretty quickly as techno was becoming hardcore. I feel like my personal taste right now would be this, but then as a free party head, a breakbeats lover, I'd love to have seen a Spiral Tribe [rave].
CR: The answer to this question is almost always Castlemorton, isn't it? Let's face it. Just because of the hugeness, it would be so epic to have experienced.
HD: No, I think that would scare the crap out of me. I would rather go to one of their warehouse raves.
TL: Not the one where the lights didn't work…
HD: No – that was this very seminal [rave] at the Camden Roundhouse. That was the one where things went wrong and it was pretty terrifying. It's been very lovingly captured in a documentary I have to mention – Free Party by Aaron Trinder. He managed to show a piece of history that we all know but has never been shown on film before. That was a lot of work, spending time making relationships with these travellers who were very wary of outsiders for obvious reasons. It's amazing.
CR: We've strongly prescribed it for all our listeners. So you've recommended Free Party already, but we have talked about that a lot on our show. Could you recommend us another film? What is a film that you love?
HD: Do you want the real answer? Well, my favourite film is Mrs. Doubtfire, slash The Bird Cage. Two Robin Williams films.
Chal: Mrs. Doubtfire is a banger and I've never seen The Bird Cage.
Holly: Robin Williams plays a gay nightclub owner on Palm Beach. His son comes to him and says, ‘I wanna get married.’ His fiance’s parents are right-wing politicians. And I'll leave it at that. There's a whole cross-dressing nightclub scene. Actually, my real favourite film is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
CR: A strong theme with all of these!
HD: That will maybe highlight some of the stuff that I also write about in my book which we haven't had a chance to discuss yet, but there is a secret agenda which hopefully materialises towards the end.
